Reviewed by: Andrew K. Semmel is the Executive Director of the Partnership for a Secure America. He is also president of AKS Consulting, whose clients include the International Atomic Energy Agency. This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Arms Control Today, and has been reprinted with the permission of the Arms Control Association.

Detect, Dismantle, and Disarm: IAEA Verification, 1992-2005
By Christine Wing and Fiona Simpson
United States Institute of Peace Press,
2013, 184 pp.

When the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force in 1970, it included a provision designating the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as its verification arm. When the IAEA was created in 1957, its principal purpose was to promote the use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes. Over the years, however, its role has changed.

Today, its more-visible function is to provide the international community with assurances that countries using nuclear science and nuclear materials are not using them to pursue weapons programs. Because of its expanded role in verification, largely through on-site inspections, the IAEA has joined the NPT as one of the two key anchors of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

Over time and particularly after 1991, the IAEA has sought to strengthen its safeguards, or verification, function. The agency failed to detect Iraq’s advanced nuclear weapons program until the United Nations gave the agency special powers in Iraq in the wake of Baghdad’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The revelation of the Iraqi program prompted the IAEA to ask its member states for a more general enhancement of its verification authority by adopting an additional protocol, based on the 1997 Model Additional Protocol, to the standard comprehensive safeguards agreement that they reach with the IAEA. These protocols are intended to strengthen the IAEA’s authority to inspect nuclear facilities, detect illegal activities, and account for the use of nuclear materials. This was a positive step that, like most quantum leaps in strengthening the international nuclear regime, came in the aftermath of a catalytic event.

Yet, any fair analysis of the effectiveness of the IAEA and the international community in detecting safeguards violations must acknowledge that the IAEA, like all international organizations, operates in an international system that is dominated by states. Furthermore, like most international organizations, the IAEA lacks the authority to compel violators to comply with their international commitments. In other words, the IAEA can be only as effective as its member states allow it to be. Fifteen years after the agency asked its member states to adopt an additional protocol, one-third of them have failed to do so. Effective verification remains a work in progress.

What then is the overall record? How successful have the IAEA and the international community been in sounding the alarm when countries seek to conceal their nuclear programs from the agency and other countries? How effective have the IAEA and the international community been in reversing secret, incipient or advanced nuclear weapons programs once detected? What helps to explain success or failure in detection, dismantlement, and disarmament? These are important questions that have not been meticulously studied and for which observers provide differing answers.

Fortunately, Christine Wing (a board member of the Arms Control Association) and Fiona Simpson have written a deeply researched, highly readable study of the IAEA’s role in detecting and dismantling the nuclear weapons programs of four countries—Iraq, North Korea, South Africa (each in the 1990s), and Libya (largely 2003-2004)—all in the post-Cold War period. As indicated above, the international community and the IAEA had not discovered a secret nuclear program prior to 1991 or developed the means and tools for verifying that a suspect program had been effectively terminated or dismantled. Starting with Iraq in 1991, the IAEA and members of the international community broke new ground in a hurry, created new precedents, devised new verification tools, and accumulated valuable experience in international verification.

Using comparative case studies, the authors of this important book provide a detailed autopsy of all four nuclear programs and describe how lessons learned from one country might be applied to another. With that dissection of the four case studies, they identify a set of verification lessons that may have relevance to two contemporary cases, Iran and Syria, that are not part of this short volume and continue to defy international resolution.

Not surprisingly, the authors conclude that successful verification depends heavily on several factors. Among these factors are the clarity and extent of each country’s commitment to cooperating with international inspectors to reach an agreement on verification. More specifically, cooperation and success in detecting violations of safeguards agreements correlate with the extent to which a country perceives it is in its interest to cooperate with the IAEA, other interested parties, or both.

Thus, South Africa invited the IAEA to verify that it had dismantled its nuclear weapons program and eliminated its nuclear weapons just as the postapartheid government believed nuclear transparency was a price to pay for re-establishing normal relations with the rest of the world. Regime change in Pretoria led to a change in national priorities that did not include nuclear weapons.

Secret talks between Libyan authorities and their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom helped set the stage for Libya’s public renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. Despite some turf battles between the IAEA and both the United States and United Kingdom, the key determinant underlying the successful dismantlement of Libya’s nuclear program was Libya’s willingness to terminate its program.

In contrast, Iraq and North Korea sought to hide their nuclear weapon programs from the outside world; resisted international sanctions, including those imposed by the UN Security Council; and made international inspections and inspectors unwelcome. Over time, draconian international sanctions were imposed on both countries.

IAEA inspections in Iraq began in May 1991 with an explicit mandate to verify the accuracy of the declarations of its nuclear materials that Iraq had made to the IAEA under its safeguards agreement with the agency. The IAEA, which the Security Council empowered with special authorities to determine the accuracy of Iraq’s declaration of its use of nuclear materials, demonstrated flexibility and innovation in carrying out its mandate. The IAEA inspections in postwar Iraq marked the first time the agency undertook the task of accounting for all nuclear materials in a member state suspected of a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The IAEA conducted 14 inspections, used swipe and area-wide environmental sampling for the first time, employed intelligence information from member states for site selection, realized more fully the benefits of unannounced inspections, and made use of global positioning satellite imagery to assist its work. The IAEA and its member states realized that verifying the accuracy of a state’s nuclear materials declaration was insufficient and that determining the accuracy and the completeness of a country’s declaration was necessary to assure the international community that the country was complying with its safeguards obligations.

When the IAEA was unable to verify the correctness of North Korea’s initial declaration in 1992, the stage was set for long-term hostility to international scrutiny that has lasted until today. Because North Korea now has conducted three nuclear weapons tests, any future verification agreement would have to include dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program and disarmament. Because the nuclear weapons program is one of North Korea’s few levers it has to extract concessions from the international community, it seems unlikely that Pyongyang would allow international inspectors to return at all or with a broad mandate.

Wing and Simpson argue that when multiple key actors get involved, there is a greater likelihood that the complexity of goals and voices will hamper effective verification and dismantlement. Here, the authors make a less convincing case. The South African and Libyan examples involved far fewer actors than did the Iraqi and North Korean cases, thereby making the verification process less cumbersome. Yet, it seems that the number of actors in each of the four cases was largely a result of the particular country’s willingness to cooperate and its calculations of the potential benefits from international inspections. At the very least, there appears to be mutual causation at work: the more a country resists external verification, the more other actors are motivated to intervene; the more outside actors get involved, the more complicated the process of verification becomes.

Finally, the authors examine the role of the IAEA in the four countries, and their analysis is interesting and instructive. They suggest a typology that portrays the IAEA in one of four different roles in the process of detection, dismantlement, and disarmament: as a sole actor (South Africa), as the most influential actor among a set of actors (North Korea at the outset but not later), as a partner with other international organizations (Iraq), and as a marginal actor in a process driven mostly by interested states (Libya). This typology seems sensible, but four countries and four different IAEA roles do not make for useful generalizations about the IAEA other than that each suspected case of noncompliance spawns its own requirements and places a premium on flexibility and learning. Collectively, the cases make the point that, in spite of the long-standing need to combat nuclear proliferation, the international tools and mechanics for doing so still are being tested and still are in their early stages of development.

The authors rightly ask, “Are the existing institutional bases and the treaties that underlie them adequate to the task of verifying nonproliferation when a state wants to hide its nuclear activities?” Although they have steadily improved over the years, international nuclear governance and the tools to detect violations of legally binding or voluntary nuclear commitments have not kept pace with international requirements. As more countries develop new civilian nuclear programs and as existing programs expand, the verification demands on the IAEA will continue to grow.

A country that is fully determined to develop a nuclear weapons program, whether inside or outside the NPT and the IAEA, can do so, although at considerable political and economic costs under the prevailing system of safeguards and international pressures. Today, Iran, North Korea, and even Syria exploit weaknesses in the nuclear nonproliferation regime and are willing to suffer international opprobrium and the negative effects of coercive diplomacy that may include a range of economic and political sanctions.

The IAEA, which is the sole international organization vested with responsibility to monitor and report on member states’ compliance with their safeguards obligations, faces a number of obstacles to carrying out that responsibility. Implicit in Wing and Simpson’s study is the acknowledgement that the IAEA not only is short on funding and authority, but also must operate with an increasingly politicized Board of Governors.

In addition, the IAEA lacks enforcement authority to make meaningful any international response to its technical judgment that a country is in noncompliance. It must rely on enforcement decisions by the UN Security Council. In the process of making a decision on what to do about a country’s noncompliance, the locus of decision-making moves from the technical reports of IAEA inspectors to the IAEA Secretariat to the Board Governors to the UN Security Council. The process grows increasingly political at each stage, and ensuring a country’s compliance with its international obligations becomes less predictable.

One important virtue of Wing and Simpson’s book is that it describes and analyzes the four tough proliferation cases in ways that are readily understandable to the lay public as well as to seasoned scholars and policy practitioners. It also shows how the IAEA must play its role as a technical international actor while being responsive to the politics and goals of the national actors on which it must rely for financial and political support.

The authors could have strengthened their book with some additional analysis of the international inspection system and its weaknesses, which are so evident with the current impasses on Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Nonetheless, Detect, Dismantle, and Disarm is a valuable contribution to the international community’s knowledge of how the IAEA safeguards system works, making clear its strengths and weaknesses.

Congressman Hamilton (D-IN) and Governor Kean (R-PA) are members of PSA’s bipartisan Advisory Board. They co-chaired the 9/11 Commission and are now co-chairs for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Homeland Security Project. This op-ed originally appeared in The Hill newspaper.

We can’t forget national security

During the presidential campaign, there was a striking lack of debate on homeland security. Given the country’s economic problems, the public understandably wasn’t focused on terrorism, and President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney may have been satisfied that the government’s reforms since the 9/11 attacks enhanced our safety and left little to debate.

The silence is eerily reminiscent of the 2000 presidential campaign, when, despite a horrific attack on a U.S. warship during the height of the campaign and the bombings of two U.S. embassies only two years before, neither candidate had much to say about terrorism. As then, we cannot afford to forego an ongoing debate on our security.

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Thomas Pickering, member of the PSA Advisory Board, along with esteemed colleges Anthony Zinni and Jim Walsh authored this Op-ed originally published in the Chicago Tribune. 

What to do about Iran?

Adlai Stevenson once advised that “to act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the true test of a man — and also of a nation.” In the face of Iran’s potential for becoming a nuclear weapons state and a threat to Israel, U.S. leaders would be smart to follow Stevenson’s advice and act prudently and intelligently.

There is little doubt that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose dangerous challenges to U.S. interests and security, as well as to the security of Israel. There is no question of the seriousness of the problems presented by Iran’s nuclear program or the need to consider the use of military force as a last resort.

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Andy Semmel served as deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear nonproliferation in the George W. Bush administration. He is on the board of directors of Partnership for a Secure America. This article originally appeared in the Washington Times.

SEMMEL: Nuclear terrorism treaties still incomplete

Congress hasn’t given its best effort to prevent nuclear terrorism. Despite broad bipartisan recognition that nuclear terror is one of the biggest threats of our time, two common-sense anti-terrorism treaties have been on the “to-do” list for more than half a decade. The Senate has the opportunity to pass those treaties in the weeks ahead and should do so for one simple reason: They would make America more secure.

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This article was written by Sen. Gary Hart and Rep. Lee Hamilton, members of PSA’s Advisory Board, and Matthew Hodes, PSA Executive Director. The article originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

Enlarging the Frame

With the next round of talks between the P5+1 and Iran coming up on May 23rd in Baghdad, we know that the parties have concluded further talks could be useful. But it still appears that the central thrust of the P5+1 (the U.S., U.K., China, Russia, France and Germany) will be limited to immediate concerns over Iran’s nuclear program and not the underlying issues that define Iran’s relationship with the international community. While we must hope that approach bears fruit, we must not lose sight of the wider frame that represents the more strategic approach, and just possibly, offers a higher likelihood of long term success.

We already know what one version of negotiations limited to the nuclear agenda can produce. In 2010, Brazil and Turkey brokered a potential deal with Iran, consistent with Iran’s existing obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that would have dealt with the enrichment issue currently under discussion but the U.S. government rejected that approach, choosing to pursue a stricter sanctions regime in the U.N. Security Council. At the same time, we also have evidence of what broader, more comprehensive negotiations might look like. In 2003, a memo, provided by the then-Swiss Ambassador to Iran, described the outline of a comprehensive U.S.-Iran negotiation process. The U.S. government questioned its legitimacy and took no action. Regardless of its provenance, the memo provided an illustration of the critical interests, the underlying issues, both for the U.S. and for Iran. Any negotiation with the Iranians over their nuclear program will stand a better chance of success if the broader issues that have created tensions since 1979, especially Iran’s role in the Middle East region, can be resolved.

What interests would the U.S. and the West want to promote and protect? Paraphrasing the memo, we would want an Iran that had no nuclear weapons or weapons program, with verification from IAEA without obstruction; we would want Iran to end its support to terror groups, including but not limited to Hamas and Hezbollah; we would want Iran to end its efforts to thwart Arab-Israeli peace and accept the two-state solution concept and; we would want an end to any effort to de-stabilize governments in the region and cooperation in efforts of the international community in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put simply, the U.S. will insist that Iran behave like a responsible neighbor in the region and submit itself to appropriate scrutiny to prove it is behaving in that manner.

What interests would the Iranians want to promote and protect? Iran would want an end to efforts to de-stabilize the current regime and acceptance into the international community of nations; Iran would want a lifting of all sanctions; Iran would want access to peaceful nuclear technology and; Iran would want Western recognition of Iranian security interests in the region. Put simply, Iran will want to normalize its status in the world and feel secure from any threats of regime change.

Thomas Pickering and William Luers, respected former U.S. diplomats, used a similar line of thought. In a recent article they used as a point of reference Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and described the anecdote in which Nixon wrote down what the Chinese would want, what we would want and what we both would want, describing this list as Nixon’s “analytical pillars.” Applying that framework to U.S.-Iran relations, they suggested a set of shared interests that one could easily take from the aims described above. They suggested that both Iran and the United States would want stability in the region, the end of terrorism, the reincorporation of Iran into the international community, and no war. Barry Blechman of the Stimson Center has also weighed in, suggesting a broader agenda that would include the issue of nuclear weapons. Far from being a sign of weakness, our willingness to offer both carrots and sticks would show our confidence. The Iranians would know that there is an alternative to war or capitulation; at the same time we would not remove military options from our list of contingencies should comprehensive negotiations fail.

As we approach the next round of negotiations, we must beware of extreme voices that will want to limit the conversation to an expansion of threats — a structure of confrontation or capitulation. Bellicose words can box us in just as they can box in the Iranians, making a military confrontation more likely. We would be better served by quiet, frank discussions about our respective interests and our potentially shared interests. We should never forget that during the Cold War, we faced an adversary that was equipped and prepared to destroy us and our allies. But while we never let our guard down, we nevertheless looked for opportunities to cooperate. Eventually, we found areas of mutual interest that helped build confidence in our ability to manage that complicated relationship. That policy worked for us during the Cold War; it should work for us with a regional actor today.

By Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) This article first appeared in The Hill.

Despite the partisanship that currently afflicts our nation’s politics, there is at least one issue that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on – the need to prevent terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear bomb-making materials. Solidifying the historic legacy of American leadership in countering nuclear terrorism, more than fifty heads of state will gather today for the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit. The summit will bring together world leaders to strengthen global defenses against nuclear terrorism, one of the gravest threats to our security. The international nature of this gathering is critical; without a global effort to strengthen global defenses against nuclear terrorism, we could easily fall short.

In the United States, enhancing global nuclear security has been an area of bipartisan cooperation for more than two decades. In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused command and control of the vast Soviet nuclear stockpile to unravel, and there was no accounting system to track nuclear weapons or materials. Fences surrounding installations that housed the Soviet nuclear arsenal were riddled with gaping holes, and there was no system to detect individuals who might steal weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. Scientists with the knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were suddenly jobless, and countless individuals – including guards at nuclear facilities – were struggling under hard economic times, giving them an incentive to steal nuclear material and sell it to the highest bidder. The challenge to keep Soviet weapons, materials, and expertise off the black market was overwhelming.

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Don’t look now, but foreign policy is back on this year’s election agenda.

While Election 2012 is still very much about the economy, foreign policy issues are increasingly making a comeback.  And as the conversation focuses more on Iran, foreign policy is emerging not because of a lack of news about the economy, but rather because of the increasing connection between the two topics.

The tensions between the U.S. and Iran illustrate the linkage.  In response to the European oil boycott, Iran recently announced that it was cutting off exports to Britain and France, which, in part, drove oil benchmarks to a nine-month high of nearly $123 a barrel.  This, in turn, “could prove worrisome for U.S. drivers since many U.S. refineries use imported oil to produce gas”.  Gas prices are already rising across the country – currently the national average is above $3.50 a gallon – and many worry that gas prices could rise beyond $4 a gallon by the summer.  There are even concerns that gas could spike to $5 a gallon if tensions surge.

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This article authored by former Senator Alan Simpson originally appeared in the McClatchy Company news service.

The U.S. Needs the U.N., and the U.N. Needs the U.S.

Jan. 12 marked the second anniversary of the horrific earthquake that ripped Haiti apart. While we quite properly remembered the unthinkable loss of Haitian lives that day, less well remembered were the deaths that same day of more than 100 U.N. officials in the collapse of the building that housed the headquarters of the U.N. mission in Haiti.

They were there in an effort to help the process of nation building in Haiti and to assist with humanitarian relief efforts there. Their deaths remind us that the United Nations and its staff members serve in many difficult places working on the most difficult issues. Their efforts serve us all.

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William Cohen is a member of PSA’s Advisory Board and former Secretary of Defense (1997-2001). This article originally appeared in The Hill newspaper.

Crossing the Rubicon

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently visited Israel and called for greater engagement between our two countries. Given the fact that it’s difficult to find a closer political bond between two countries anywhere in this galaxy, one would surmise that there’s little distance to travel to cement the relationship between our two democracies. After all, we share similar values, ideals and interests.

There exists, however, a singular and important difference within this triangle of bonded friendship. Israel lives in a neighborhood that is far more unstable than that enjoyed by the United States. The geographic proximity of those whose stated goal is to vanquish the state of Israel — and who could soon have the capacity to do so — causes the Israelis to view threats through a different prism.

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Advisory Board Member and former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, discusses his recommendations for U.S. Policy in Iran. His recommendations include greater cooperation with the United Nations, collaboration with regional partners, and intelligence sharing in addition to many other points of leverage and influence the United States could use. The article originally appeared here on CNN.

Washington (CNN) — Longtime observers of the Middle East are baffled by allegations that high-ranking officials in the Iranian government approved a plan to assassinate Saudi Arabia Ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, and blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington. Commentators have described the plan as “brazen,” but “bizarre” and ‘bone-headed” might be more appropriate adjectives.

It’s difficult to comprehend either the motives or the means selected to carry out the plan outlined by the Justice Department in its criminal indictment of Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri. Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia are not new, but Iran has been both cautious and clever enough to restrain its ambitions for regional dominance.

If the allegations of the assassination and bombing plot are true, and the covert operation had proved successful, Iran’s leaders would have invited retaliation on a scale far more vigorous than any they might have contemplated. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that the Iranian landscape would likely have been substantially altered.

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